The Beach House

by Beth Reekles

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Beth Reekles

  Cover art copyright © by Shutterstock

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published by RHCP Digital, an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK, a Random House Group Company, London 2019. Subsequently published as an ebook in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, New York, in 2019.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Ebook ISBN 9780593172568

  First Delacorte Press Ebook Edition 2019

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Every summer since I could remember, we’d head up the coast to the Flynns’ beach house. Summer there was like a dream.

  Packing for the beach house, though, was always my own personal nightmare.

  Always.

  It never used to be so bad when my mom did it for me—back when I was a little girl who didn’t really know or care what I needed. But now I would make more of an effort…and then lose my patience, turn my suitcase over, and start again.

  It was midmorning on Wednesday, the day before we left, and Dad came into my room with a glass of soda for me.

  “It looks like a bomb’s gone off in here,” he said, laughing.

  “I hate packing.”

  “Don’t forget to take aftersun.”

  “Okay, okay, okay!” No way was I going to forget that; last year I’d burnt the back of my legs so badly, it had been painful to sit down. My dad looked around the room, shook his head, and abandoned me to the chaos.

  In the end, I packed the same as always: plenty of swimwear and flip-flops and sun hats, plus some shorts and T-shirts. I eventually threw in a yellow sundress that the girls had convinced me to buy on a day out shopping—just in case.

  Part of the reason I was having even more trouble packing this year was because I had a boyfriend now, and he’d be there with us. I’d known Noah and Lee Flynn all my life, and Lee was my best friend, but in the last few months, Noah had gone from being just Lee’s older brother to…well, my boyfriend.

  Which meant that we might end up going on a date, especially since we weren’t sneaking around anymore….

  I smiled at that. No more sneaking around! No more hiding it from my best friend because I was worried we would hurt his feelings. We were officially dating.

  As much as it made me smile, it also made me want to yank at my hair in frustration. What if I wanted to dress nicer to go out places with Noah? Would there be some kind of new rule that meant I couldn’t slouch around in threadbare pajama shorts and a shapeless tank top anywhere near him?

  I picked up the pajamas I’d happily worn for the past few months. Definitely not the kind you want your boyfriend to see you in—especially when he’s easily the hottest guy in school, with that swoon-worthy smirk—but it’s not like I had anything different to wear.

  I sighed and said to myself, “To hell with it,” and threw them in my case.

  A voice sounded behind me. “To hell with what?”

  “Hi, Lee,” I greeted him, not even having to glance over my shoulder to know my best friend since forever was standing in my doorway.

  “What did you do in here—blow up your closet?”

  “Yeah. We had a fight. I think it wants to file for divorce.”

  He laughed, and I heard him dropping clothes onto the floor from my bed. I turned round to tell him to be careful and not crease my stuff, when he dropped face-first onto my duvet.

  “What were you grumbling to yourself about?” he asked.

  “Nothing, just…”

  He raised an eyebrow, giving me that unconvinced expression that told me he knew exactly what was up but just wanted to hear me say it. “Bikini not skimpy enough for my brother?”

  I threw a tank top at him. “No, it’s not that.”

  “Then what? Oh, man, no, don’t tell me you’re gonna make me go shopping for lingerie or something. Please, Shelly, anything but that! Tampons I can do, but not—not—lingerie!”

  I laughed. Lee was about the only person I’d let get away with calling me Shelly instead of Elle (short for Rochelle), although Noah would use the nickname too, just to tease me. “Not that either. It’s my pajamas.”

  “Oh, that’s all you’re worried about?” Lee laughed. He rolled on my bed and leaned over the edge to look into my case. “You’ll look fine whatever you’re wearing. Besides, it’s not like he’s really going to care.”

  I smiled at Lee. No matter what was getting me down, he could always brighten me back up in an instant.

  “How long have you been packing now, anyway?” he asked. “Eighteen hours?”

  I wavered. “Eight.”

  My best friend gave me a long, flat look, and then we both burst out laughing.

  “I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you”—I pointed an accusing finger at him—“haven’t even started yet.”

  “You,” he told me, pointing a finger back at me, “would be totally right.”

  Lee cleared his throat suddenly and picked up my pillow, tweaking at the pillowcase.

  “So…you’re still cool Rachel’s coming with us, right?”

  You’ve only asked about a billion times….

  It was like he was worried I’d throw a tantrum, tell him he couldn’t change things this year and how dare he bring his girlfriend!

  I mean, in a way, yeah, I wanted to tell him that I didn’t want Rachel there. I wanted it to be the same as it always was and always had been.

  But how selfish would that be?

  For one thing, I was dating his older brother. I could hardly tell Lee I didn’t want him to bring his girlfriend along when I’d have my boyfriend there.

  Besides, even if I weren’t with Noah, things were always going to be different this year anyway.

  Noah wouldn’t be staying the whole time: he was leaving two days earlier than the rest of us with his dad to check out the Harvard campus. They were flying to Massachusetts while we stayed behind.

  I hated that things had to change. Growing up, I’d thought we’d always have the beach house. That no matter what, every summer we’d go there—and for just a couple of days, we could act like kids and just hang out. Even when we’d gotten older, and Noah drifted away from us to go to parties on the beach in the night or make out with rand
om girls who fawned over him, he’d always come back to hang out with us. Because there, with the sea and the sand and nobody else around, none of us cared what anybody thought. Summer at the beach house meant everything was different, but different in the best kind of way.

  Except this year, I wasn’t so sure.

  I blinked, looking at Lee and pulling myself out of my thoughts.

  It didn’t matter if I was cool with Rachel coming with us or not—she was Lee’s girlfriend. I had to be okay with it, for him.

  It was lucky I liked her.

  “Yeah, of course I am,” I answered him. “When did you say she’s coming down?”

  “Monday,” he told me. “And her family is picking her up on Thursday afternoon, on their way to visit some relatives.”

  “Okay.” I nodded and grabbed a pair of pants from the floor, folding them up.

  “Elle, are you sure you’re okay about—”

  “Yes!” I laughed to reinforce my words. “Yes, I’m okay about it, Lee, for the billionth time already! Besides, it’ll be nice for your mom and me to have some female company for a change. There’s only so much of you we can handle, you know.”

  “I did catch on to that,” he said with a smirk. “Given how little time we’ve spent together over the past few years.”

  Both of us laughed, and I grinned at Lee.

  “Go on, get your butt back home and start packing!” I shoved him off my bed. “If you forget to pack your trunks again this year, you are not borrowing one of my bikinis. I do not need a repeat performance of that!”

  * * *

  At six-thirty the next morning, I was at the top of the stairs, ready to haul my suitcase down to the porch. A knock sounded on the front door and Lee opened it, stepping inside.

  “Whoa, watch it!” he exclaimed, and was suddenly leaping up the stairs to take my bag from me before I got past the third step. I’d been gripping the banister hard to keep myself from toppling over—my suitcase weighed a ton.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  As we reached the door, there was movement from near the kitchen. Lee looked past me and I turned to see my dad standing there in his pajamas and old burgundy robe, his glasses sitting a little crooked on his face and too far down his nose. He pushed them back up.

  “You kids ready to set off, then?”

  “Yup,” the two of us answered in unison.

  “You know the drill: no mad parties drinking tequila, don’t swim out too far, be nice to the other kids…”

  “We know,” we chorused.

  Dad laughed, but it broke off with a yawn. “I know, I know, same parental spiel as every year, right? Come on then, Elle, let’s have a hug before you go.”

  I went over and gave my dad a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Be careful.”

  I rolled my eyes. What did he think I was going to do—see if I could beat up a shark and live to tell the tale? Honestly…

  “You know what I mean.”

  I frowned questioningly at him. Did I?

  Lee coughed pointedly by the door, and Dad shifted from foot to foot and crossed his arms. He clenched his jaw briefly, looking uncomfortable, then said, “With Noah.”

  Somehow, I managed to keep my cheeks from flaming. Instead, I sighed and rolled my eyes again elaborately.

  On the bright side, at least Lee didn’t make any sarcastic comments. It was bad enough that he’d bought me a pack of condoms for my birthday. Then he’d given them to me in front of not only his parents and Noah, and my ten-year-old brother, but my dad too! Lee’s way of dealing with the awkwardness of me dating his brother was to crack jokes.

  You can just imagine how much the whole condoms thing made me laugh. Ha-ha.

  “I’ll be fine, Dad. Stop worrying. I’ll call you when we get there,” I said.

  “All right, bud.” He smiled and, for a second, he looked more like a forty-eight-year-old man than he usually did. But only for a moment, and by then I’d already started back to the front door. Lee picked up my suitcase before I had the chance to.

  “Lee?”

  He half turned toward to my dad. “Yeah?”

  “Look after my little girl for me, will you?”

  It wasn’t Dad I was looking at now; it was my best friend. And he was looking back at me with a soft, friendly smile on his face. His blue eyes were warm and familiar, and the freckles spattered across his nose were embedded in my memory, as they had been for over a decade. I felt the sudden urge to hug him tight and be glad that whatever else went on, however much things changed with us getting boyfriends and girlfriends and growing up, I always had Lee.

  A small part of me, in a voice that sounded oddly like Lee’s in my mind, told me to stop being so cheesy.

  “Don’t worry,” Lee said, watching me, and I could tell his thoughts were on the same wavelength as mine. “I will.”

  Chapter 2

  Instead of all of us cramming into his dad’s car, this year Lee and I were in Lee’s ’65 convertible Mustang, and the two of us spent the whole drive singing along to the radio at the top of our lungs and joking around. The journey went by way more quickly than usual.

  Well, that—or Lee was speeding.

  We arrived after the others, though they couldn’t have been there for very long; Matthew, Lee’s dad, was only just shutting the trunk and locking the car. He gave us a smile and a wave.

  “Roads okay?”

  I swung out of the car and put my huge straw bag up on my shoulder. “Yeah.”

  Lee was still in the driver’s seat, clearing up the jumble of candy-bar wrappers and empty bottles. He was normally messy, but he was way too proud of his car to leave trash in there.

  I opened up the trunk and tried to get a good grip on my suitcase. I started to hoist it out, and wondered what the hell I’d packed for the next ten days that made it so heavy.

  “Need to borrow some muscle?”

  I let go of my bag with a surprised huff and it slid back into the car with a heavy thunk. I looked over my shoulder, hair falling in my face, to see Noah, as sexy and handsome as ever, arching a dark eyebrow with his trademark smug look on his face.

  My heart somersaulted in my chest and I couldn’t hold back my smile—even if I’d only just seen him two days ago. Noah grinned as I stepped toward him for a kiss, his arms wrapping round my waist to hold me closer. He smelled so good. And looked good too, in his board shorts and a fitted white T-shirt.

  “Hey, you.”

  “Hey, yourself,” he murmured, his mouth smiling against mine. “So—want a hand with your bag?”

  “It’s all yours, Superman.”

  I couldn’t resist making that dig—just before we got together, I’d caught him wearing Superman boxers. And he’d actually been embarrassed about it! Noah Flynn, the school badass, the jerk who I always argued with…wearing Superman boxers.

  He hated it whenever I brought it up. But teasing him was irresistible sometimes.

  He dropped a kiss on my cheek before lugging my suitcase out of the trunk and following me up the steps of the porch. The white paint was always flaking, no matter how many times Lee’s parents gave us twenty bucks to spend an afternoon painting it. The bench on the porch creaked like it was about to snap in half every time you sat down; I ran a hand over one of its arms as I passed to go inside.

  The beach house had a lot of rooms, but they were all small, packed tightly together. The furniture hadn’t been replaced in years; some of it was from when we were little kids. There was a pool outside and a table we usually ate at in the evenings if it wasn’t raining, and a path that was always overgrown with rough plants leading down to the beach. The whole thing was the polar opposite of the immaculately put-together Flynn home in the city with its modern decor.

  We loved it exactly as it was—a little shabby, lived-
in, and homey.

  In my eyes, it was perfect.

  “I’m just going to run and get some food,” June announced, walking out of the kitchen as I was coming down the hallway. She smiled when she saw me. “Hey, Elle, sweetie.”

  I said hello and hugged her while Noah squeezed past to drop my suitcase in my room.

  “Do you want some company to the store?” I offered.

  “No, no, that’s okay. You stay here and unpack.”

  Then, holding me at a little distance and looking at me with that gentle, motherly smile she always wore, June said something that caught me totally off guard, because it was so out of the blue.

  “Look at you, Elle. You suddenly seem so grown-up.”

  “Why? Because I had to use that special zipper that makes my suitcase expand?”

  “No.” She laughed. “I don’t know—I can’t quite pinpoint it. You just seem like you’ve become a real young woman recently. Anyway—listen to me rambling on like this! I’m getting out of here before I find myself looking for any baby photos lying around! Oh, and tell the boys we’re having steak for dinner.”

  “Sure thing,” I called as June headed back toward the kitchen.

  I started down the hallway in the direction of the bedrooms. Lee and I had ours side by side with Noah’s, separated by a bathroom in the middle that we all shared. It might’ve made more sense for the boys to have a room together, but they’d always bickered so much when we were little, it had been Lee and me who’d shared—and we’d just never changed that. (And despite how cool June and Matthew were, they’d made a point of drawing the line at me sharing a room with Noah.)

  Noah was on his way back outside, and stopped in the kitchen doorway.

  “Thanks for the help with my suitcase.”

  “What, that’s it? I don’t get a tip?”

  I laughed as if to tell him No chance. He caught my wrist and stepped in front of me in the doorframe to pin me there.